


we follow the path that we believe in, we're not gonna stop until we reach it

by eynn



Series: i can't go back and lose it all [7]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Nobody Dies, Order 66, finally they talk to each other yes, important council stuff while the clones are panicking about being telepathic, sith!jedi order, so i guess this is jedi temple conversation, the entire order is shipping anidala so hard, well part of the council most of them are in the dreamscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23242096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: Mace Windu stands at a window high up in the Jedi Temple and watches as the clone troopers clustered just inside the Temple grounds patrol them. It looked like most of a battalion is crammed into the first floor and the security section.He’s tried comming Ponds, to find out what the hell was going on, but there had been no answer. Yoda had tried comming Thire, but he hadn’t answered either.There had been no communication from any of the clones since they had received a hurried holocall from Commander Fox, telling them that the Temple was under attack or was going to be very shortly, and they needed to raise all the security they could while getting the younglings ready to evacuate.
Series: i can't go back and lose it all [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658362
Comments: 21
Kudos: 1143





	we follow the path that we believe in, we're not gonna stop until we reach it

Mace Windu stands at a window high up in the Jedi Temple and watches as the clone troopers clustered just inside the Temple grounds patrol them. It looked like most of a battalion is crammed into the first floor and the security section.

He’s tried comming Ponds, to find out what the hell was going on, but there had been no answer. Yoda had tried comming Thire, but he hadn’t answered either.

There had been no communication from any of the clones since they had received a hurried holocall from Commander Fox, telling them that the Temple was under attack or was going to be very shortly, and they needed to raise all the security they could while getting the younglings ready to evacuate.

Mace wonders why the Chancellor hasn’t tried communicating with them. Oddly enough, none of their calls out are going through, except ones to the clones they are personally in command of.

He suspects the men below him have something to do with it, but he can’t deactivate the security barrier they have raised, keeping all the Jedi locked inside. It’s an ancient mechanism, made to resist both Force-users and lightsabers. It was meant to be used as a last line of defense against invading Sith, but now the clones are using it to keep them inside.

He doesn’t sense any hostility or aggression from the men, just an overwhelming sense of duty and worry. That worries him in turn.

Footsteps sound behind him, and he turns to find Kit Fisto joining him at the window.

“Have you tried calling the rest of the Council?” he asks.

Kit bobs his head. “None answered. I also tried to contact their commanders, but none of those answered either.”

“I can still sense them in the Force,” Mace says thoughtfully. “They feel strangely distant, as if they are in a deep meditation or unconscious, but they are alive.”

“Master Yoda said the same.”

“Who is here? Have we completed the accounting?”

“You and I, Master Yoda, Master Tiin, and Master Mundi are the Council members present. As for the rest –” Kit sighs. “All the younglings and padawans still here and not assigned to the front are safe. Most of the rest of us as well. Some are still unaccounted for, and I fear they’re either here on Coruscant but locked out of the Temple, or have gone off-planet.”

“Vos.”

“Vos,” Kit confirms. “We have no idea where he is at the moment. Also, Knight Offee may be with General Unduli, but we don’t know for sure.”

“I thought she was on creche duty.”

“She’s supposed to be.”

Mace breathes in and out carefully. _Knight Offee is a good Jedi and a valuable asset to the Order,_ he reminds himself. _She just has a slight tendency to be a loose cannon._

Kit quirks a playful lekk at him. “Wherever she is, I hope she’s safe.”

“Yes.”

“Master Yoda wishes to meet in the Council room, even if the rest cannot call in.”

“We’d better get going then,” he says, turning on his heel.

~

The Council room feels empty without most of their members. Master Yoda leans back in his seat and regards them with something sad and resigned flickering in his eyes.

“For this, responsible I feel,” he says, taking them all by surprise. “If listened to the Force I had, come, this day would not.”

“What do you mean?” Ki-Adi asks.

Yoda’s ears droop. “Clouded, the Force has been. Done purposefully, it must have. Yet I, too confident in our strength, I was. Blind we have all been for many years.”

They exchange uneasy glances.

Mace knows the Force has been clouded for years. He’s felt it himself. But it’s less cloudy now, after he’s . . . turned to some alternative techniques for winning these interminable wars. He wonders if he should speak up, say that he can see more clearly.

“Uncompassionate, unloving, hateful we were, to young Skywalker,” Yoda continues.

Mace nods. One of the things he has discovered about himself since the haze cleared is that he doesn’t actually mind Knight Skywalker, and the distrust and hairtrigger dislike he’s always had about him were not his own.

“And cruel we have been to Master Kenobi too, leaving him alone.” Yoda nods and leans back in his seat, closing his eyes.

“So how do we fix it?” Kit says after a heavy silence.

“Apologize,” Yoda says without opening his eyes. “Change.”

“I feel as if the Order has already begun to undergo something of a change,” Saesee says, his eyes flitting from face to face. “There have been some – more open displays of attachment, than would have ever been sanctioned before.”

“I remember such,” Yoda says. “Many many years ago. Stronger we were, then.”

“Such as Knight Skywalker’s marriage outside the Order?” Mace dares to say.

The smile that spreads across Kit and Yoda’s faces is pure happiness.

“Glad I am that he has found a suitable partner in life.”

“They’re adorable together,” Kit says.

“His marriage that he took some pains to keep secret from all of us, even his own master and his padawan, as well as all his men,” Mace continues. He has a confession to make, and a point also, but they’re both hard to come out and say.

That flattens the mood.

“I wonder what he feared we would do to her?”

“Nothing!” Ki-Adi snaps. “How could we ever harm an innocent who loves one of our own?”

“Are you sure he did not fear for himself?” Saesee asks.

Mace shrugs. “I think it will always be his nature to value himself less than those he loves.”

“When did it all begin to change?” Kit wonders aloud. “It was after the war began. When we all got sent out away from here.”

“Alone, we were, and began to rely on our men, we did,” Yoda says, but without judgement.

“Yes,” Mace says slowly. “Those very convenient clone troopers. Who were trained to work with us, to trust us, and to look after us. Who we did not ask for, because their very creation to be slaves is an abhorrence to all we hold to be true.”

Nobody has ever come right out and said their clones were slaves before. Mace finds that he doesn’t care. If he could get there, he’d go crash a Senate session just to scream it in front of them all.

Kit’s lekku are drooping. “I have never thought of a single one of them as lesser than I.”

“But many do,” Ki-Adi says. “Even a few of us.”

“Krell,” he almost growls.

“Found him, we have not,” says Yoda.

Mace’s eye twitches. He knows exactly where Krell is; in several pieces, burned to ash. Master Koon had not been happy about the slaughter he had created for the clones, and neither had Master Kenobi.

Pong Krell hadn’t stood a chance against them. Mace hadn’t even had to take out his lightsaber.

“He will not be a problem,” he says.

“Did you -- ?”

Ki-Adi’s question hangs in the air.

“I was an observer, not more. We all took an oath to defend the innocents and the enslaved, as you might recall. Some of us have become a little more proactive about that oath.”

“And have you?”

Mace holds his head high and looks at his fellow Council members. “I have. I do not regret a moment of that choice.”

He holds out his lightsaber, pointing it towards the floor, and briefly flicks it on. It’s still aubergine. It hasn’t changed, and he has felt no less comfortable with it since his perspective shifted.

“Regret, I do not as well,” Yoda says, showing his own green lightsaber in the same manner.

Mace jerks his gaze around and sees the same fire that burns in his eyes now when he is angry reflected in the Master of the Order.

Ki-Adi sighs. “I suppose this is a good time to admit that I also gave in to a similar temptation.” His hands tighten on the arms of his chair. “I could not bear seeing young Ahsoka there, dragged into the Senate’s politics for no good reason at all, falsely accused and being used.” He spits the last word. “I was blind for many years, as Master Yoda has said, but now I have come to my senses and I am deeply ashamed of my cowardice.”

Saesee nods. “As am I. I cannot go on seeing the soldiers die in such numbers while the Senate and the Chancellor are content to cheer them on and provide no hope or help.”

The four of them look at each other with a mingled sense of relief and nervousness.

Kit laughs. “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, since it’s been my best-kept secret ever since I was a youngling, but I don’t exactly hold to the strict Code either.”

“Are we all, then . . .?” Ki-Adi hesitates.

“Sith,” Mace finishes firmly, and nods. “I do not like to think of myself as one, but I can’t go on being known as Jedi when that name has become synonymous with war and political maneuvering. I don’t want to cause needless pain, I don’t want an empire, I don’t want power for power’s sake. I just want the ones I love to be safe, and this war to end.”

“Well said,” Yoda says as they absorb his words. He hops down from his chair, his stick tapping on the floor. “My aspirations, those are. Ashamed I am of my callousness. Told my Thire such, I did, many months ago.”

Saesee coughs. “Your Thire?”

Yoda turns to look at him. “Old, I am. Many younglings I have cared for, but long ago it became duty. Continue to care for them after they grow, I was afraid to. My children, my men are. To death I refuse to give them.”

“No more,” Mace says, thinking of all the battlefields covered in bodies he has walked since this war began.

“No more,” the Council echoes.

Yoda hits his stick on the floor. “Obey the Senate blindly, no more we will. Finish this war, we will. Negotiation or battle. Have any say in the treating of our kir’manir ade, they do not.”

Mace feels himself smile as Yoda speaks in the language of their troops, and he sees it reflected in the faces of the others. They’ve all learned a little of it, enough to communicate to their men when they are too distracted to remember Basic.

_Usually it’s because they’re dying,_ he thinks, and viciously swats the memories away.

“We are locked in here,” Kit points out. “What can we do?”

Yoda begins to slowly leave the room. “Talk to them!” he flings over his shoulder. “Help them, I will. Trust them. More than the Senate, I do.” He pauses. “Save us, perhaps that will.”


End file.
